Pint of View Lecture 9: Kabul: The Danger of a Single Story

Pint of View London presents

Kabul: The Danger of a Single Story

What I found walking and writing in Kabul and what it reveals about our gaze

When you arrive looking for something specific—conflict, trauma, exoticism—you find it. But what happens when you're not looking? What would you find?

This lecture is about two things: Kabul and gaze.

Kabul as a city, not a symbol. It has its Hackney, Oxford Street, Borough Market, Camden. Artists, chefs, poets, grandmothers. Best places to eat and viewpoints.

Your gaze. The politics, power and art of looking.

Taran Khan walked through Kabul as a journalist tracing her Pashtun heritage and wrote Shadow City about what she saw. This talk is about what she found and what it reveals about our gaze and cities everywhere.

For anyone curious about Kabul and the art of looking. Also for those interested in how travel writing has shaped our worldview and what alternatives exist.

Taran is walking London now. What is she seeing in our city?

Expect 45 minutes of lecture followed by a Q&A. Then we open it up for mixing, conversations, and meeting people who are just as curious as you.  

About The Speaker

Taran N. Khan is a journalist and award-winning author of the book Shadow City: A Woman Walks Kabul. From 2006 to 2013, Taran spent long periods living and working in Kabul. As a Muslim woman raised in a small town in India, Taran had access to parts of Kabul uncharted by other travellers and journalists.

Over a series of long visits, she documented the city's changes as it began to heal from conflict, then observed the cycle of transformation all over again when the Taliban regained control.

Taran has published widely in the London Review of Books, Al Jazeera, Granta, the Guardian, LitHub, McSweeney's, Himal Southasian and Guernica, writing on culture, cinema, gender, conflict and migration.

Taran’s work is about the gaze itself—how who you are determines what you see, and what stories get told as a result. She is currently walking through London with the same attention, asking what a rooted gaze reveals in a familiar city.

Information on us and tickets can be found on our main page here.